Our purpose here is to do some
thinking about the essential commodity of human life, indeed the essential
substance of all living things. Some now blithely say that competition
for water will be the basis for future war between nations. Some say,
with climate change, we'll have too much water, or we'll get it at the wrong
time in the wrong amounts, or delivered by powerful, ocean-generated
weather. Closer to home, in the United States at least, legal paradigms
with which to determine how water is apportioned strain when supply gets
short. Drought is a growing concern. Hopefully the writing posted
here will encourage you to dig deeper in your own thoughts about the justice
of water use and management.
Like the air we breathe, water is an essential component of this globe's life-engendering habitat. We can't live without it. In the history of western civilization, water has been believed to be a "common" asset, available to all. And yet, access to it has proved confrontational in private-property oriented societies, as well as between governments and nations. Justice is, of course, about balancing the respective merits of competing claims in unique, and sometimes confrontational, contexts. And justice is not just about the rules, for those may well have been set in place to create and protect wealth, power and station. Justice has a greater reference, a greater home, than law itself. Because need for water is global and time immemorial, water justice inquiry invokes broad societal and temporal reference, research and contemplation.
Hopefully you will discover, as you review the materials provided here, that these thoughts are not "all wet," and that the humor, if and where it exists, is not exceedingly "dry."
James Davenport
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